


Prototype

by deervelvet



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Gen, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 01:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15401961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deervelvet/pseuds/deervelvet
Summary: Day 3 of Gundam 00 Week 2018.Prompt: “Prototype” - First Line VS Last LineHe’s started to understand for some time now just what it is that Hallelujah does while he sleeps. [Pre-canon character study.]





	Prototype

_//when innocence turns into a simple power, it creates shadows in the world//_

 

* * *

 

Forty one thousand sixty six.

 

Forty one thousand sixty seven.

 

Forty one thousand sixty eight.

 

Forty one thousand sixty nine steps, and Allelujah’s legs give out from underneath him. His knees quiver, then buckle, and he finds himself in a breathless, sweat-drenched heap.

 

“That’s it,” he breathes quietly to the empty alleyway in which he’s found himself. “That’s it; I can’t go any more.”

 

There’s not much left of the strength in the sinewy, lean legs that are now lost inside the ratty jeans Allelujah has, at some point, acquired for himself. What few calories he was able to last scrounge up are dripping from his hair in the form of sodium-rich sweat and radiating off of his body as heat even despite the muggy summer atmosphere. But out here in the open, he’s not safe. Out here in the open, he can be spotted too easily for his liking.

 

And so, tapping into his reserves as much as he can, he half-crawls, half-walks into what he’s decided will be his makeshift shelter for tonight: the narrow space between two industrial-sized dumpsters. A larger man would likely not fit into the tight opening, but for Allelujah, it’s perfect. Despite the stench of putrefying meat scraps, spoiled dairy, and what he hopes is not (but knows to be) urine, despite the way the asphalt between the hulking metal bins is sticky with both spiderwebs and with food residue, despite the way everything surrounding him is unforgivingly hard - brick and metal and concrete - Allelujah is safe here, and for now, safety takes primacy over comfort.

 

As he’s settling in, back against the construction block wall behind him and exhausted legs pulled up to his chest, his stomach rumbles lamely. It’s been days since he’s truly felt hungry. From time to time, his stomach will let out a pathetic little whine to let him know it still exists, and would like to - if possible - be attended to at some point, but it’s not the same as before. Allelujah can remember a time when he actually felt hunger, and he thinks there’s something funny about the fact that it was a time in which food was much, much more abundant. Well, not _funny_ funny. There’s a word for that kind of phenomenon, he thinks, but he’s not sure what it is. Irony, maybe? He’s not sure.

 

The sun is setting low between the skyscrapers of Guangzhou and painting their glittering, mirror-like windows with the colors of an urban sunset: smoggy yellow fading into a fiery orange and cooling into a deep magenta. From his position, Allelujah can’t see them, but he’s seen them often enough to know what they look like at this hour. In twenty minutes or so, the street lights will begin to blink on. After that, the brilliant colors of the evening will all fade into a singular bright blue. There are no stars in the city; the constant light from neon signs and traffic lights and hotel windows block out the stars even on the clearest of nights. The moon may come out, but it will be lost in a skyline of helicopters and searchlights and car charging station signs.

 

It’s the same here in Guangzhou as in every city Allelujah’s slept in since falling to Earth. Summer is hot and sticky with no relief, and it leaves the city’s residents feeling chronically dirty. It simmers all of the grime and filth until it’s distilled pure, and only the occasional thunderstorm comes to flood the gutters and wash it all away. Winter is its own form of cruel; asphalt and steel offer no warmth in the biting winds, and storefront displays only tease with the illusion of cozy nights spent with family sitting around the radiator wrapped in fleece blankets and enjoying a hearty holiday meal - all available for a price, cash or credit.

 

Something in one of the dumpsters rattles as Allelujah is just drifting off to sleep. His head snaps up immediately and the sound repeats itself. It’s a hollow, metallic sound, and he can imagine a mostly-empty soup can being dragged across the asphalt. Even as worn out as they are, every fiber in his body tenses and readies him for fight-or-flight. He’s on his feet as best he can be in the cramped space. His pupils are wide in the dim light, trying desperately to drink in any extra details they can. His heart is pounding. Sweat beads on his lip and drips down from his hairline along his ear.

 

He can’t be found.

 

A cat, scrawny and dirty, emerges from on top of the dumpster. Just a cat.

 

Flopping bodily back against the cinder block wall, Allelujah heaves a sigh of relief. The cat seems startled by the noise, apparently unaware that it was not alone, and jolts, leaping down from the lip of the dumpster onto the alleyway and half scurrying away.

 

In the Institute, he’d had a cat. Rather, there had been something of a class pet; Allelujah, himself, did not _own_ the cat. But he had liked the cat’s company very much. It had been a runty little creature with wild orange fur and equally orange eyes that had been introduced as a mechanism by which to keep out vermin. Even in a colony hundreds of miles from the Earth’s surface, rodents had found a way to infiltrate and act a nuisance when it came to food stores. Allelujah and his cohorts had attempted to teach the animal all manner of tricks - standing on its hind legs, meowing on command, turning around three times in a row at the snap of a finger - but mostly, they enjoyed petting its soft back and feeling its rough tongue on their hands. They liked the comfort it brought them when they were hot with fever and it snuggled into the crook of their neck (even if it was pure selfishness on the cat’s part as it sought out warmth). Even if they had been too young to realize it at the time, they liked the way that it roamed the Institute halls as if it owned the place despite the fact that it was just as much a prisoner as they were.

 

His stomach rumbles.

 

“Wait,” Allelujah rasps out. To his surprise, the cat obeys, stopping dead in its tracks and craning its neck back over its shoulder to lock eyes with the young man. “Here,” Allelujah calls softly. He extends a hand, palm upwards, and beckons, “Kitty, kitty. Come here.”

 

The cat, not fully convinced, turns its body to match the way its head is facing and sniffs the rank air filling the alleyway. In the coppery light of a street lamp, Allelujah can make out a set of whiskers, two dozen or more altogether, twinkling like gossamer. The cat is mostly white underneath with patches of a darker color on its back - maybe dark tabby grey or even solid black - and its round eyes stand out on its white face like two endlessly deep pits. Occasionally, it rotates an ear to listen to something beyond the alley, but mostly, it’s fixated on the boy calling for it. This is not something the cat must have experienced often, Allelujah thinks as he wiggles his fingers. This cat is young, and naive. Just a big kitten. This cat doesn’t know the dangers of talking to a stranger. This cat doesn’t know it’s not the top of the predatory food chain.

 

Allelujah’s stomach rumbles.

 

The cat approaches him.

 

“Don’t!” Allelujah snaps suddenly, slamming a fist into the dumpster to his right, and the cat takes off down the alleyway at full tilt until it rounds a corner and is out of sight.

 

The sun has set fully now, and the only light comes from artificial sources.

 

“I could have eaten that,” Allelujah remarks aloud. There is no one else in the alleyway.

 

“I can’t eat a cat,” he then counters himself immediately.

 

“I have to eat,” he reasons, already trying to stand.

 

“But it’s alive,” he offers, voice dripping with disgust. “It’s a living thing!” Disgust and distraught. The young man’s voice trembles as if it may crack into a wail.

 

“And so?” All traces of upset from just seconds prior are gone. “So am I. It’s natural to eat living things. If I don’t eat that cat, some dog will.”

 

“Hallelujah,” Allelujah whimpers.

 

“I’ve eaten much worse for us,” the young man continues. “Much worse than a cat. Do you want me to tell you what I’ve eaten for us?”

 

“Hallelujah,” Allelujah whimpers again, more pathetically than before. More aghast. More distressed.

 

“Food did not magically arrive in that shuttle just because I dealt with the other mouths that were taking it away from me. Do you know what I ate when the food finally ran out?”

 

Allelujah suddenly finds the strength in his legs to get himself into a standing position, and in the morning, there will be a new odor rising on the boiling, inner-city heat as he vomits pure bile into the little space in which he was just sitting. Acid and drool still dripping from his lips and chin, he says, “I do many things for this body that I don’t tell you about. I am surviving. You don’t need to question what I do.”

 

Allelujah is crying, but he doesn’t feel sad. In fact, he doesn’t feel much of anything. But he cries anyway. Little breathless sobs wrack him for a good long while in the empty alleyway as voices and the sounds of traffic and sirens echo through the streets.

 

Of course Allelujah has noticed that, some mornings, his stomach is inexplicably full and there is a strange taste in his mouth. Of course he’s noticed that he sometimes wakes up in a place that he didn’t settle in to sleep. He isn’t ignorant to the fact that he carries a switchblade that he doesn’t remember picking up. It would be impossible to miss that, sometimes, he’s covered in scrapes and bruises and blood - maybe not his own - that he didn’t remember having when he fell asleep, all the fear and adrenaline and sheer terror of a life-or-death fight he can’t remember still coursing through his veins. He’s started to understand for some time now just what it is that Hallelujah does while he sleeps.

 

Allelujah knows, he just doesn’t want to say it.

 

“Nothing alive,” Allelujah finally composes himself enough to say, and he says it with so much finality that he hears himself - no, hears Hallelujah repeat it aloud with equal conviction.

 

“We’re not eating anything that we have to kill,” Allelujah reiterates.

 

“Unless we’re dying,” Hallelujah tacks on. “Or if that thing is trying to kill us.”

 

Allelujah wants to protest the addendum to the pact he’s crafted, but he knows there’s little use; Hallelujah will do what Hallelujah always does. Hallelujah will see them through this night and many others. And Allelujah doesn’t dare say anything because he knows by now that Hallelujah only ever really does what Allelujah wants, anyway.

 

* * *

  


_//the once-living wreckage that surfaces in this area has started to be visible to your alter ego, nevertheless, I shelter you//_

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhat based off of Gundam 00P, in which essentially Hallelujah dispatches with entire teams of HRL soldiers sent to retrieve E-0057, and somewhat based off of the episode where Allelujah returns to the colony to destroy the Institute in which Hallelujah declares (at least in the dub) that he’ll drink the blood of others to survive if necessary. He would probably be about 14 or 15 here, a bit before his recruitment into CB. 
> 
> G00 Week ‘18 for me has kind of just become “my favorites deserve better”.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Prototype](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18714343) by [arkadyevna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arkadyevna/pseuds/arkadyevna)




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